This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, December 7th, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Financial Crisis has many narratives and some are more popular than others, but some important stories of the crisis have really yet to be told.

Charles Calamiris is a professor of financial institutions at Columbia University.

We spoke during the Cato Institute's monetary conference in November.

A lot of people make the case that this was all caused by particular agents in the US government, which while potentially true, they

might be pointing the finger in the wrong direction.

What do you see as sort of an untold story relating to our financial crisis?

I would say that we have a few untold stories.

And it's useful to divide them into two parts, why the crisis started and why it got so much worse.

Why it started is an interesting story about Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the FHA, and more generally government housing policies

that made leverage

that subsidized housing through leverage subsidies

and did so so differently

in the 10 years prior to the crisis

than we had done before.

I think that's a, that leveraging story is going to be the one that 50 years ago, from now people

are going to be talking about and it's not one that's really been appreciated.

There were other contributors but I think that's the one that people have not really put enough

weight on yet but are going to.

Now on the second issue though how the crisis got so big I think

the issue there is going to be that and I think many people haven't really got their hands around this yet.

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